In The Glitch Aesthetic, Rebecca Jackson studies examples of glitch art of the 2000’s and early 2010’s. This will help us create a broad, but not complete (due to length limits), understanding of the different uses of glitch horror in recent cinema. This essay will be organized by a set of categories of the different uses of glitch in horror: the glitch as index, the glitch as monster, and finally the glitch as existential or cosmic threat. This means we won’t study films like Videodrome (1983, David Cronenberg) or Ringu (1998, Hideo Nakata). It is also important to precise that we will here only study the digital glitches and not the analogous ones. His examination of the glitch is one of medium analysis, focused on the psychological, social and even political aspects of the subject, while ours is much more oriented towards the glitch’s poetic and practical language, and what it can symbolize in a horror setting. Denson here is particularly interested in the role of the glitch in a possible transition to post-cinematic media. Such as Rebecca Jackson’s The Glitch Aesthetic, or the fifth chapter of Shane Denson’s book Discorrelated Images, called “The Horrors of Discorrelation”, where the author analyses the presence of the glitch in Unfriended. We will cite repeatedly some very useful and recent works on the voluntary use of glitch visuals in film.

We will focus here on a selection of works featuring glitch horror, such as Cloverfield (2008, Matt Reeves) Unfriended (2014, Leo Gabriadze) Unfriended: Dark Web (2018, Stephen Susco) the Tuesday the 17th segment (directed by Glenn McQuaid) in the anthology film V/H/S (2012, led by Brad Miska) the fourth and sixth episodes of the web-series Don’t Hug Me I’m Scared (2015 & 2016, Becky Sloan & Joseph Pelling). However, it is important to point out that we will only be analyzing visual glitch art, such as pixelation, data-moshing or color degredation, as auditive glitches take place in a whole other realm that we won’t get to dive into. Indeed, there have been multiple uses of glitch aesthetics in horror or horror-adjacent content in the late 2000’s and throughout the 2010’s, and said use will be our subject of study in this paper. Originating from niche and underground artistic circles, glitch art has since infiltrated popular media, and eventually the horror genre in video-games, short films, and feature films. Rebecca Jackson, in her thesis The Glitch Aesthetic published in 2011, makes a very concise definition of the glitch: “A glitch is the result of miscommunication from sender to receiver during the transcoding of information.” 1 While the glitch is originally spontaneous, many artists have tried manufacturing them for aesthetic and poetic purposes, hence the term glitch art. One of these new expressive forms of post-modern anxiety is Glitch Art. This subject has only gotten more popular with time, taking numerous forms and creating well-established tropes. This makes the cinematographic medium especially prone to tackle the anxiety-inducing post-modern relationship between human and technology. Even if that apparatus has been much simpler to use since the arrival of digital technology (one can create a film by using only smartphones and different apps for each stage of the film-making process), the complex and technological nature of film stays. Machines intervene in every single aspect of film-making. Whether it is analogous or digital, creating film and moving images has, in most cases, required the presence of a complex apparatus. Glitched Universal introduction sequence in UnfriendedĬinema is a deeply technological form of art.

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